Top Ten Smartest, Sizzlingest Beach Reads

ELLE's hands-down favorite novelist, and sometime contributor, Christensen is the real deal: a proven best-seller with In the Drink and winner of literature's prestigious 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for her last novel, The Great Man. But this time out, she's in a wild mood, kicking off her latest with a wickedly spot-on rant about someone who preternaturally resembles Madonna. Soon we're deep into a girlfriends-in-distress yarn about a woman who has just walked away from her marriage holing up in a Mexico City hotel with her longtime best girlfriend, a rock-star who's fleeing tabloid hell. And what they get up to south of the border is nothing but more, you guessed it, trouble. Our July Reader's Prize panel dug it, and you will too.

Summer ’09 Reading List

Summer ’09 Reading List

Jessica Simpson, sweetie, have I got the book for you! In fact, Tony Romo telling security at his gated community to take you off the "admit" list would have stood proudly with the best of the death-of-romance punch lines in this snappy, crackly, poppin' little paperback. (Go ahead, drop it in the sand—drop it in the water! No big deal. And trust me—you will drop it, laughing and/or crying, probably even before you get to the end of Junot Diaz's opening account of cheating on his girlfriend, fessing up just before taking her to visit his childhood home in the Dominican Republic, and ending up physically attacking a huge tortoise shell in their bedroom.) This week various contributors to the book are posting codas, second thoughts, and random notes on the publisher's website, so you can double your pleasure—or mortification—after you read their grimly hilarious and hilariously grim remembrances. Jessica—listen, baby, everybody plays the...oh, never mind. It's just—you've got plenty of company. Here's proof—and I loved it.